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Back home after mercy mission

Ailsa Cranna
20/10/2005

RADCLIFFE firefighters came under fire from rebel gunmen as they searched through the rubble to free survivors of Pakistan's earthquake.

Mick Dewar and colleague Martin Fisher had to be pulled off their rescue mission and ordered back to the safety of their camp as the bullets flew between the rebels and government troops.

Eventually the pair, and the rest of their rescue team from Greater Manchester Fire Service, were airlifted to more remote villages to carry out their mercy missions in relative safety.

Mick, 37, said: "The situation is very volatile out there anyway with factions fighting each other and the troops.

"The earthquake had thrown the whole area into absolute chaos. I don't think the gunmen were aiming at us - they were just frustrated the troops weren't handing out emergency supplies quickly enough and people were starving."

The team of seven from Greater Manchester had all trained with the UK Search and Rescue Service and within an hour of landing in Pakistan had rescued a 36-year-old man trapped by his arm under the rubble that was his home.

The following morning they rescued another man and helped locate a third survivor trapped underneath all that remained of his chemist's shop.

For the rest of the seven days the team worked on the grim task of identifying where bodies were located.

Mick said: "After four days, there was really no hope of realistically finding anybody alive. What made it worse was when desperate families would plead with us in broken English to find their relatives, take us to the collapsed building and we then had to tell them we couldn't do anything.

"Even in their unbearable grief, they were still thanking us. The dignity of these people was tremendous. I can't speak highly enough of the way they conducted themselves throughout all this tragedy."

Sub Officer Martin Fisher, 45, from Radcliffe, has over 22 years experience and has worked on other rescue missions, like the Algerian earthquake in 2003.

He said: "It was obvious when we went to some buildings that no-one had survived - one particularly distressing case was a school where all the female pupils had died.

"Telling the parents there was no hope was very hard - no amount of training ever prepares you for that."